After holding a twitter poll of whether I should tackle my Trails backlog or dive back into Persona, Persona 5 Royal won so I decided to give my 2nd Persona game a try. Warning, there will be some light spoilers so if you have yet to play beware if you are reading.
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So I’ll say right off the bat – it wasn’t as funny as Persona 4 Golden. I have many many videos and highlights on my Twitch channel from P4G where I am utterly howling with laughter and crying until my sides hurt. Unfortunately P5R didn’t have even remotely the amount of funny scenes and in fact most of them were just groan inducing humor of Ryuji being a dumbass. The real funny stuff was usually within the localization itself or in social link scenes with Yusuke. So on that note, I found myself to be a bit disappointed.
P5R is very very clearly going with a completely different vibe from P4G. The best way to sum this up is how one of the very first things you get to do once all the cutscenes end is that you’re pushed out the door and told to get your ass to school. You get dumped out at Shibuya station and have to figure out where your connection is within this gigantic labyrinth with zero help from anyone anywhere. And of course once you finally figure it out, and the trains finally arrive, and you finally get to school, it starts raining and you end up late and your teachers get mad at you for this. At no point here does your adorable little moppet of a cousin show you where to go, nor does anyone crash their bike dick-first into a telephone pole.
Also I do want to point out that I think it was a pretty big achievement that despite how slangy the dialogue is in this game, the localization managed to avoid being incredibly cringe.
However that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the game. One thing that Royal did vs Golden is a lot of in game mechanics were much simpler and it was a lot easier to find and see your confidants. For example in P4G I had to basically run around all over the place in hopes I could find Chie or Kanji to talk to them and hope they had a little cut scene. In this one it was very obvious where all the confidants were and they had specific icons showing that they have a special scene rather than just a sentence of dialogue and nothing more. Also when your confidants were close to leveling or just wanted to remind you that they exist, they would frequently send you a message and if you replied you want to see them BAM instantly you would be teleported right in front of them. The fast travel made the game SO much less grueling especially because I frequently got lost in the stupid Shibuya train station. 🤣
P5R plays SO SO SO much better than P4G did. Part of this is because the UI is much better this time, which makes it a lot easier to know who you can interact with and what you can do on a given day (and what you need to do in order to progress the MSQ when there’s a specific objective you need to complete). But I also think that they probably paid a lot more attention to how they set up the timetables for all the different activities. A big problem in P4G was also that you often needed to actually precisely schedule your time to figure out how and when you could do anything because there were often too many different requirements for when you could do something, like “it’s not raining and there isn’t a specific story event and Dojima isn’t forcing you to stay home because he came home early and it’s a school night”. Meanwhile in P5R since you’re in Tokyo you can usually do whatever you want whenever you want and if you want to talk to someone you can just wait until they call you up.
The game also gave me a SAFE mode which was even easier than easy mode which allowed you to restart a battle if you died and it would raise and fully heal your entire party. I only needed to use this twice when I attacked an enemy that reflected my damage and instantly killed me lol. I didn’t realize until late into the game that I had an OP Izanagi Picaro DLC so for a while I was playing legit trying to get as many personas as I could and merging them in the pokemon blender. However once I realized I can use a high level Persona that’s 20 levels above me I pretty much never looked back 🤣🤣. Because of this the game was pretty much low stress for me and honestly the only “stressful” thing were the last 4 Palaces of the game had some annoying puzzle mechanics which gave me unfortunate war flashbacks to FFX’s cloysters. 😩
lol the dungeons were fine. The layouts of all of them essentially boiled down to “go to the unexplored section of your minimap, then look for any objects to interact with, then continue to the next unexplored section of your minimap.” It was a big improvement over the “go through a dozen procedurally generated hallways” dungeon design of P4G. In general even though we were playing on the easiest easy modo and using the pay to win DLC personas, the combat is very simple even without all that built in. Just like in Pokemon, all you need to do is counter their pocket monsters with ones that are invulnerable to and/or are strong against their types. And once you start outleveling the enemies you just instakill them without even needing to fight them.
As far as characters go, unlike P4G we actually had a lot more smarter people this time around. The only real dumbass was Ryuji and though Ann was a bit on the dumb side sometimes you have to admit she was an excellent actor because every time her “bad acts” happened they always worked 100% XD. So whatever Ryuji say what you will, but her acts got us places lol. In P4G it felt like everyone was a dumbass except Chie who was just the “common sense” one by default and Naoto because she was a detective. Also unlike P4G the NPCs were surprisingly smart too and a lot of them figured out that Ren was in the Phantom Thieves. I swear in P4G nobody outside the main group ever figured out that people were jumping into the TV at night. The 2 new characters, Dr. Maruki and Kasumi I really just didn’t vibe with. I mean I get Maruki’s deal and his long stemmed NTR regret but Kasumi just felt shoved in for the sake of having a waifu in there. I know she was part of Maruki’s story but her being there or not being there really didn’t matter in my opinion. I also hated her overly positive vibes – and while I get why she was like that it kinda put me off at the start because it felt so fake the whole time (and then it was revealed to be fake anyway lol.) And of course can’t forget my favorite baby nuko Morgana – who I loved much more than Teddy. I’m glad Mona stayed cat most of the game (and the Studdly Youth was just a short bit) because he was so cute (´;ω;`).
Ryuji is “the dumb one” simply because he’s just a jock. Meanwhile each member of the cast in P4G were all plumbing the depths of stupidity in heretofore undiscovered ways. Or compare Teddy and how infinitely birdbrained he was to Morgana, who fills you in on all the details of the Metaverse and explains all the game mechanics and even helps you with your scheduling. Oh and how this time Ann fills in the role of “the one with common sense” yet the bar is so high among the Phantom Thieves that it’s only enough to get above Ryuji. Meanwhile in P4G Yukiko is supposed to be “the smart one” (before Naoto joins) and she has some of the most bafflingly strange actions out of all of them.
Oh and I also thought it was a big improvement that by adding stat bonsuses to all the confidants it gives the player a lot more of an incentive to actually complete their social links. P4G had the problem that so many of your social links were utter randos like Daycare Milf or Dying Granny or That Fox At The Shrine that we at best sidelined and at worst completely forgot existed in favor of interacting with the real characters, so by giving them those buffs it encourages players to at least try meeting with them a few times. Kawakami kept calling us for months for example and we refused to respond back because “grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr I will NOT have Ren sully himself by talking to a slutty maid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” until one day when nobody else was around to talk to and surprise! “wtf nooo if I knew that she’d let me slack off in class and do other stuff I would’ve started her immediately.”
And as usual I didn’t go cheating with every girl in the game and I only focused on shipping Ren with Makoto. I picked Makoto because I like that she was always pressured into being this model student but deep down inside she just wanted to punch a bitch. Her reactions to Ren were also really cute and generally I actually ended up shipping other characters with each other which left her to be the only one I shipped with him. For example I liked Ryuji and Ann together, they were friends of course but I could see a Barbie/Ken type fun relationship with them. I also loved the interactions between Yusuke and Futaba especially since she gave him the nickname Inari. They were both weird in their own ways and focused on their hobbies so I found them to be cute together as well. I didn’t really care much about Haru because she came into the party too late in the game and well Akechi is the obvious yaoi ship but he had way too much Scryed energy because of Souichiro Hoshi voicing him. My only disappointment is P4G gave us a kiss scene but we only got hugging and hand holding in P5. Gotta make sure I remedy that with a fanart later. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Update:
https://twitter.com/breadmasterlee/status/1664676484877877248
Look let’s face it, the game was playing clear favorites in terms of waifus. Unlike P4G where all the non-Naoto waifus were fair game (although let’s be real, why would you even talk to the rando waifus like Band Girl or Basketball Manager), they very obviously signal that Makoto is the shin no waifu. (Akechi of course is the shin no husbando.) The only other theoretically acceptable choice would be Joker having a harem of all the random other waifus outside of the team in order to prevent ~drama~ between the team waifus…but even that’s unlikely since everyone else is also blatantly paired up with someone else anyway.
Overall I enjoyed the game though, even though it wasn’t as funny as P4G. It is a very long game though and while I have 87 hours in my save slots, Steam has me clocking in 100 hours of play time. It took me an entire month to get through but it was a fun ride with an awesome soundtrack I can’t wait to revisit when I play the dancing game. My Persona adventures however are not over yet. I will be playing not only the dancing games but also Persona 5 Strikers before moving on to Persona 3. 😎
When we finished P5R we went back to Steam to check the playtime and were surprised that P4G took less than two weeks to complete while this took an entire month. It goes to show just how well Atlus smoothed out the game that the former felt like it took forever but was actually fairly quick while this one was the shortest 100 hour game I’ve ever played.
And for all you fellow MakoRen shippers I bring you 1.5 hours of Makoto x Ren scenes from the game!
Bread Master Lee 
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